Universities need not assist anti-gay stance

Re “A war over words,” editorial, April 15

The Times addresses the wrong concern: The “war” isn’t over “words,” it’s about whether public universities have to help anti-gay, activist Christian students make their verbal attacks on homosexuals. Although these students have a constitutional right to express their opinions, there is no requirement that a university provide them with a microphone and podium.

Universities, to their credit, have established broadly based nondiscrimination policies that campus groups may agree to as a condition for using university facilities. If a white supremacist group doesn’t agree with the university policy, its members can still make racist remarks; they just can’t expect the university to provide them with loudspeakers. Likewise, if religiously oriented students want to preach hate against gays, they can do it; they just can’t expect a publicly funded university to help them.

DAVID MICHELS

Encino

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College Republicans are going to have to choose: They either want free speech or they don’t. By undermining speech codes intended to protect minority students from abusive language, campus conservatives have proved beyond doubt that the so-called students’ rights movement is simply a ploy intended to punish faculty members for their alleged liberal bias.

Opening campus speech to hate speech directed at gay students also means that campus speech must remain open to the defamation of everyone else -- not least, the president of the United States.

RUSSELL A. BURGOS

Faculty Fellow, UCLA

Thousand Oaks